The Trouble with Bliss

by Douglas Light

Sofar is an anchorite, confined to the worn rooms of his small space. He lives on delivery, never leaves the building, paranoid that the moment he steps outside, he’ll be booted from his rent-stabilized apartment.

  His fears are well-founded.

  The last time he stepped out, his place was broken into and Hambone was dognapped. Everything was left a mess.

  It was Hatfield, the then-owner of the building, that broke in. He desperately wanted Sofar out, wanted his rent-stabilized apartment back.

  For thirty-seven years Sofar’s lived here, moving in when he was a young man of twenty-eight, a man willing to try anything. At that time, the neighborhood was broken. Even with the police precinct a few doors down, the street was scary. It was cluttered with car batteries and three-wheeled baby carriages. Rats stalked the sidewalks like hyenas on the veldt, whistling out sharp-pitched choruses during their nightly trolls. Sofar wanted to be a painter, or a composer, or someone who did something so cutting-edge that it earned him multitudes of praise, even though no one understood it. He needed a cheap place to live, a place to launch his life’s endeavor, once he finally determined what it was. Apartment 10, the sixth floor apartment he took, had no rooms, no walls, was like an open boxcar or an empty cracker box when he moved in. Torn and dark, the hardwood floors looked like someone had tried to ice skate on them. Exposed pipes ran the walls, dropped from the ceiling, like veins ripped from the skin. The glass in the windows was spiderwebbed with cracks and the toilet, yellowed with grime, stood strangely alone near the back of the place, attached to the wall. No shower. No kitchen. No oven.

  “What’s the rent?” Sofar asked Hatfield, looking the space over.

  “Fix it up a bit, at your own expense,” Hatfield said, chewing his fingernail, “and it’s yours, rent-free, for a year. No,” he said, instantly retracting his statement. The walk-up to the sixth floor had made him light in the head. He didn’t know what he was saying. “Six months,” he told Sofar. “Let’s say six months then we can talk leases.”

  If Sofar was going to do the work, he wanted a lease, something binding. “I want a lease,” he said, “something binding.”

  Hatfield glanced about, like he was viewing a meteorite crater or trying to locate the source of a howling baby. He cared nothing for the building, had inherited it from his father, a man whose death he was neither happy nor sad about. For him, the building was capital. The meager rents were gravy, a bit of extra cash each month. “What are you willing to pay?” he asked.

  “Fifteen dollars a month,” Sofar ventured. It was nineteen sixty-eight; no one wanted to live there. Still, fifteen dollars was extremely low. “And I’ll do all the repairs. Put up some walls, the kitchen, find an oven, all of it.” He waved his hands about the room, painting the vision.

  “A hundred,” Hatfield countered. “And no repairs.”

  After fifteen minutes of negotiations, Sofar and Hatfield agreed on a lease of forty-two dollars, with Sofar building the place out, making repairs, improving.

  Sofar got a home. Hatfield thought he’d gotten a chump and free renovations.

  Even before Hatfield left the building, before he made his way down the dilapidated stairs, he was thinking of how he’d kick Sofar out. Let him make the repairs, he thought, and after the year’s lease is up, he’s out. The place could be rented for more.

  Hatfield was disabused of this notion three months later when he finally got around to dropping off the signed contract with his attorney. That apartment, the attorney explained, was rent stabilized. A tenant’s rent could only go up by a certain percentage, a percentage dictated by New York State Rental Guidelines Board. “You make your money by having turnover,” the attorney said. “Someone leaves, make some basic improvements to the place, up the rent by twenty percent.”

  “Basic improvements?” Hatfield owner said. “Like re-flooring the place, getting a new refrigerator?”

  “God no,” the attorney said, laughing sharply. “I said basic. You throw a little fresh paint on the walls, wipe down the oven, flush the toilet.”

  “And then I can up the rent?”

  “There’s some forms to fill out, some ‘work related’ receipts we need to provide,” he said, “but yes, essentially, that’s all you do.”

  “Then I just kick him out once I’m ready, once I think I can get more for the place.”

  “You can’t,” the attorney said. “You can’t kick him out, unless he doesn’t pay his rent or does something egregious.”

  “Egregious?” Hatfield asked, having a hard time saying the word. “What would that be?”

  “Setting the place on fire, definitely,” he said. “Shitting in the hall, possibly. Murder,” he said, then, “Well, maybe not murder.” He’d have to get back to him on that one. “But the longer he stays,” the attorney informed him, “the worse it is for you. If he stays, say, twenty years, until nineteen ninety, he’ll still be paying something like a hundred dollars.”

  “A hundred isn’t bad for that hole,” Hatfield said, not fully thinking it through. “And he’s making repairs for free.”

  “We’re in the space age,” the attorney countered. “We’re in the future. A hundred sounds fine right now, but think about what the place will be worth in twenty years. I’d bet you could get two-fifty a month for it,” he said with confidence.

  “Maybe three hundred,” Hatfield said, getting excited.

  “Let’s not slip into fantasy,” the attorney said. “It’s a walk-up, remember?”

  “I’ll get him out,” Hatfield said. “As soon as it’s worth it, he’ll be out. That you can be sure of.”

  But two weeks later, he met a woman named Lawrence, got married, and moved to Wyoming, officially becoming an absentee landlord, collecting rents and doing little else.

  The Blisses moved into their apartment the spring of nineteen sixty-nine, signing a lease for a hundred and five dollars, over double what Sofar was paying. But their apartment, which was directly below Sofar’s, was in better condition, had appliances, was livable. Which was important: the Blisses were going to have a baby. Morris was arriving.

  Sofar and the Blisses became friends, each visiting the other. Seymour, needing to escape the moods of his wife and the cries of his baby boy, would take a six-pack of beer up to Sofar’s, spend the evening talking things instantly forgotten. During the day, with Seymour was at work, Sofar would venture down to visit Stavroula and the newborn, Morris, pass a couple hours chin-wagging. Sofar doted on Stavroula, brought her small gifts, and helped with the baby. He fell in love with her.

  “Tell me about your family?” Sofar once asked her.

  “My family?” Stavroula said, busying herself. “Seymour and Morris here,” she said, picking up her baby, “they’re my family.”

  “I mean, do you have siblings? A brother, sister? Are your parents still alive?”

  “Seymour and Morris,” she repeated, “are my family.”

  It was the first and last time Sofar asked. Family, he could tell, was not something to speak of.

  The seventies passed. Sofar searched for his calling, studying sculpting, then dance, then Tai Chi. He went to bad art openings that served hangover-inducing wine and dated extremely thin women who had the habit of leaving the bathroom door open when they used the toilet. He got a dog, named her Hambone, and found an odd pleasure in collecting porcelain Hummel’s. His love for Stavroula grew.

  Morris grew. By age eight, he was walking Hambone for Sofar. He ran errands, picking up eggs or a pound of blood oranges for him, always getting a tip for his work.

  Hatfield returned to the city after a decade in Wyoming. He’d grown tired of raising polo ponies, tired of the severe weather and explaining to others that Lawrence, his wife, was a woman. He left her and their small ranch.

  Having hemorrhaged half his assets from the wound of divorce, he went about rebuilding his holdings. He took an active role in the running of his building, wanting to turn the highest profit possib
le.

  It was time to clear the deadwood. Sofar had to go.

  Hatfield made evening visits to his building, five forty-five daily, roamed the halls with a tool belt loaded with tools that had never been used. He was a Superintendent of sorts, though he never fixed a thing. He’d knock on Sofar’s door with the sole purpose of knocking, of rousting him from whatever he was doing. Hambone would set into barking.

  When Sofar answered, Hatfield would say, “Aren’t you ready for a change?” or “Staten Island has great views,” or “You’re taking advantage of me, paying so little.” Five to six times a week, between five forty-five and six o’clock, he’d hammer on Sofar’s door in the hopes that Sofar would finally relent, give in and say, “Okay, okay, I’ll move.”

  He never did, never would. Sofar stayed. Time passed.

  Hatfield didn’t bother the Blisses; he knew better. The one time he knocked, Seymour greeted him with an eight-inch Bowie knife. “Rent’s paid,” Seymour said, cleaning his nails with the blade. “No other reason you should be knocking.”

  Hatfield didn’t bother the Blisses.

  He kept up his assault on Sofar, though. The entreaties and threats tapered off for a couple years when Hatfield became involved with Nana, the North American sales representative for Ciao Pussy products, a shoddy knock-off of the Hello Kitty cartoon. But when that relationship flamed out, he turned his attention back to his building. He started in again with Sofar, now offering a handful of twenties for him to move. “To cover your moving costs,” he’d say, or “I need this apartment back” or “Come on, for Christ sake, let someone else have a turn.”

  Sofar wasn’t moving.

  In the spring of 1981, there was a change. The Bliss family wasn’t the same. Sofar could sense it. The air in their place was heavy and somber, a miasma of tension and unhappiness, but each time he asked either Seymour or Stavroula, he was told, “Everything’s fine.”

  It wasn’t.

  Then one evening, there was a knock at Sofar’s door. It was after six, so he knew it wasn’t Hatfield. That, and Hambone didn’t bark. She always barked at Hatfield, knew it was him at the door.

  It was Stavroula. She’d come to say goodbye.

  “Goodbye?” Sofar asked, upset. He was losing his neighbor, one of the few people he’d come to love. “You’re moving?”

  “I’m leaving,” she said, her voice charred with resignation. “For a while.”

  “What do you mean?” he asked. “What’s happened? Is it Seymour? What’s he done?”

  “It’s me,” she told him, then kissed him on the cheek. “It’s something in me,” she told him.

  With the burn of her kiss still on his cheek, Sofar realized that her family was his. He loved her, had lived a vicarious relationship through her, experiencing all the problems and joys of a family. Had lived a life not his own. “I don’t want you to go,” he told her, taking her hand. He struggled for words, wanting to say more, say something consequential, affecting.

  “I don’t want to go,” Stavroula said, her eyes pooling. “But I need to go.” Her hand broke from of his. The door quietly shut.

  That night, Sofar sat in a dark room, his chest feeling hollowed out by a hand axe. His fabric of Hope, the cloth that kept the cold of the world from chilling him, slightly tore.